“It’s such sad news for our country,” he said. “In Ireland, you can just meet someone and tell them your life story and they’ll actually remember it. It’s a special thing. We Irish are like no one else in the world that way and it’s sad we have to move abroad for work.”

A 29-year-old trained chef, Matthews is poised to join the exodus and say goodbye to his family in Swords, a small bedroom community on the outskirts of Dublin. He’s moving to New Zealand to work for a restaurant that has promised to pay him $40,000 a year.

“I can’t even make enough in Ireland to help out my mother who raised me, and that’s a shame,” he said on a recent evening, pacing a local soccer field where he spent much of his youth.

Matthews and his friends are part of the biggest wave of emigration Ireland has seen in decades.

During the 12 months ending April 2011, 76,400 Irish left the country, according to Ireland’s Central Statistics office. For comparison’s sake, that would almost be as if 1 million Canadians picked up and left Canada.

The mass departure, which some now estimate has reached 2,000 per week, may eventually rival Ireland’s historic and scarring 19th-century migration, when a potato famine forced more than 1 million to forge across the Atlantic.

The collective rush for the exit is already affecting many sectors of the economy.

Over the past three years, 1,500 Irish pubs have closed their doors.

While part of the downturn is due to new tough drunk-driving and anti-smoking laws, as well as low-priced beer and liquor in grocery chains, emigration is a “big part of the problem,” said Padraig Cribben, chief executive of the Vintners’ Federation of Ireland.

“You look around at what’s happening in rural Ireland and some parts of the country can’t even field a (soccer) or hurley team any more,” he said. “There are counties here that have been literally denuded of young people.”

Middle-class families rushed to take on mortgages for second and third homes at low interest rates, hoping to keep them as investments or flip the properties as prices skyrocketed. Taxi drivers began driving BMWs, Mercedes and even Bentleys. Families thought nothing of dropping $100,000 on a wedding party.

But by 2008, with murmurs growing that much of the money loaned for new construction was unrecoverable, investors began selling shares in Ireland’s three main banks, Anglo Irish, Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland. When the government stepped in and guaranteed the banks’ loans, it set the stage for a massive bailout.

In October 2010, to avoid defaulting on its international debt, Ireland accepted a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and European Union. The massive loan came with strict conditions. Lenders insisted Ireland accept across-the-board cutbacks that squeezed budgets ranging from health care to education.

In Limerick, for instance, the city’s 30 midwives are scheduled to accept voluntary separation packages this month, but there are no plans to replace any of them, said Marian Harkin, an Irish member of European Parliament, adding the cutbacks will “devastate” local health care.

As public- and private-sector spending stalled, overall unemployment spiked from 4 per cent in 2006 to more than 14 per cent. Unemployment among the young — they’ve become widely known as “Generation Bailout” — has rocketed to almost 30 per cent, giving Ireland one of the highest youth unemployment rates in western Europe and setting the stage for the latest wave of emigrants.

“Our schedule to repay our bailout money is predicated on growth,” Harkin said in an interview. “How are we going to possibly be able to pay these debts when our best young people, our best chances to raise income tax revenue, are leaving because they can’t get jobs here? It’s a vicious circle.”

Some politicians have heralded news that foreign companies might expand their operations in Ireland. But even that won’t offset the country’s financial woes, said Sean Kay, a professor of politics at Ohio Wesleyan University and author of a book about Ireland’s financial crisis.

The country has a 12.5 per cent corporate tax rate, attractive enough to draw the likes of Google, Dell and others. (By contrast, most large businesses in Ontario pay 26.6 per cent.) But to reduce taxes in Ireland, foreign companies often funnel revenue through other European Union countries en route to tax havens such as Bermuda.

The manoeuvre is completely legal and known as the “Double Irish.” It helps companies because Irish law exempts some corporate royalties so long as they are paid to firms in other EU countries.

“These large multinationals really aren’t helping many people, and they certainly aren’t adding a lot to the tax coffers,” Kay says. “What Ireland is going through has been a punch in the gut.”

Monahan, the Dublin artist, said one of the most difficult aspects has been the country’s collapse from its brief period of prosperity.

“We know what it is to say goodbye and it’s hard when you realize you’re in the same place all over again,” he said. “I come from a family of four children and I was the only one who stayed in Dublin. There are going to be countless generations to come that will be in the same spot, not enjoying those interfamily connections, and that’s a huge loss.”